Acquia Enhances Personalization with TruCentric Buy

Acquia is making the most of its revenue growth. The company, a provider of open-source software, services and technical support based on the open source Drupal web content management system (CMS), just acquired TruCentric.

TruCentric is a Toronto, Ontario-based vendor whose SaaS solution includes real time customer profiling for user engagement. The solution uses situational and historical data for marketers.

The buy comes on the heels of 20 consecutive quarters of revenue growth for Acquia. The company has grown its revenue by more than 48,500 percent during the past five years, according to Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer. Revenue from sales was $44 million in 2012 and exceeded $68 million in 2013.

Acquia, based in Burlington, Mass., had 450 employees before the acquisition. It did not disclose the number of employees at TruCentric nor the acquisition price.

Building Off Lift

Just three months ago, Acquia announced Acquia Lift, an optimization platform that promises to make websites smarter, marketers more productive and revenues greater. It combined content personalization and target marketing with machine-learning and analytics. The platform is built to help marketers remember its prospect targets and uses additional data to drive decisions. Acquia's been around since 2007.

Marketers are able to create, iterate and optimize content within the same interface, rather than moving between web content management (WCM) and targeting systems. Acquia Lift customers or others who use Drupal don't have to toggle between screens and engage in other frustrating tasks.

Wentworth, in an interview with CMSWire this week, said the acquisition helps Acquia expand its digital engagement and commerce segment of the business. This, he said, helps marketers create hyper-personalized digital experiences for all customers, and increase conversions.

TruCentric will become part of the Acquia Lift product family, Wentworth said. TruCentric will be merged with Acquia Lift, starting initially with behavioral targeting and segmentation capabilities over the next two months, Wentworth told CMSWire.

It’s easy for a marketer to target a known segment, but anonymous visitors make it hard for marketers to know who exactly who is visiting the site and what will best compel them to take the desired action. What’s harder, is that customer segments are always changing as companies introduce new products or marketing campaigns."

Fills a Gap

Asked if this filled a gap for Acquia, Wentworth said TruCentric advances Acquia's existing digital engagement and commerce offerings by providing "deep, real time insight into visitor behavior that yields necessary context for more effective website personalization and commerce."

"As content and commerce converge," he said,

Acquia and TruCentric can help organizations bring their brand to life in a highly engaging online shopping experience that is content rich, socially immersive, and personal. The joint solution will seamlessly integrate known data with anonymous data to build a higher level understanding of customer segments. These analytic insights, paired with Acquia Lift's testing and personalization capabilities, will transform digital interactions into hyper-personalized experiences."

With Lift, he added, digital marketers can easily create, iterate and optimize content directly within Drupal, rather than toggling between multiple products and managing content in multiple systems.

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